It seems to me that dedication to things of God is a dedication to reality, regardless of what that reality is. So, our publishing efforts reflect that value. My wife Kimberly and I have walked some tough roads, and we’ve found out that life isn’t always what we thought it was, or should be. So our goal is to allow authors to write with an abandon to reality, either directly in creative nonfiction or symbolically in fiction and poetry. When the authors of the Bible wrote their stuff, they weren’t abashed to talk about anything. Sex, violence, unresolved conflict and issues, tough calls, they’re all in there. We like to skip a lot of that because it’s not pretty, isn’t safe for our 6-year-old, or doesn’t jive with the picket fence world that we’d all prefer. But if it’s good enough for God to let into His book, we figure it’s good enough to let into ours.

“Alarming though (I hope) readers may find these tales,” Kirk writes, “I did not write them to impose meaningless terror upon the innocent . . . what I have attempted, rather, are experiments in the moral imagination. . . . All important literature has some ethical end; and the tale of the preternatural—as written by George Macdonald, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and other masters—can be an instrument for the recovery of moral order.”